31 October 2007

In 1987–88, the Far Outliers, with their two-year-old daughter in tow, spent a year teaching English at a new community college in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, China. The following is one of a series of articles I wrote in 1988. I sent them to a Honolulu newspaper, but they were not interested. So now I offer them as a retrospective on coastal China twenty years before hosting its first Olympics. At the same time, I am scanning in a lot of our old China photos and uploading them to my Flickr account or to my better-illustrated WordPress blog to illustrate this series.

One of my Chinese students wrote:

"Play baseball must have two group and each one have nine person. They stand in the place and play the ball. One group is throw the ball to the other group. The other group must approach the ball and fielding the ball. Before the ball coming you must watch the ball because you must keep it."

I corrected the grammar but didn't worry about the ideas. It's hard to explain baseball in ten minutes, even when you have a blackboard to work with.

You don't have to understand baseball—or cricket or rugby or Aussie rules or American football—to master basic English. But when you teach English abroad, someone is bound to ask you what it means to strike out, throw someone a curve, or be out in left field.

I don't feel too confident myself explaining cricket phrases like "sticky wicket," and I'm even foggier about what the Hong Kong newscaster means when he says "Pakistan are 396 for seven in the third day of play" in a Commonwealth cricket tournament.

To our students in Zhongshan, the eating habits of English-speaking peoples are at least as peculiar as their sports—and more essential to understand, especially when many will go to work in the local visitor industry.

A few examples from our role-play in class illustrate:

Teacher: "I'll take your chicken and pineapple salad."Student: "What kind of dressing would you like on it? We have oil, vinegar, French, Italian, Russian, and British."

Eating raw vegetables tossed with dressing is a foreign notion in China. Lettuce, called "raw vegetable" (sheng cai), is abundant in the markets. But our students asked, "Have you ever eaten it raw?" We never did there.

Teacher: "I'll take the French onion soup, the roast beef medium rare, and apple pie for dessert."Student: "And what kind of sandwich would you like?"

Our students figure a complete meal should include at least one item under each major section of the menu, just as a complete Cantonese meal might include a soup, a poultry dish, a seafood dish, a meat dish, and a vegetable dish. And they don't usually measure the size of a meal by the number of helpings eaten. They count the number of dishes served.

Teacher: "I'd like a beverage with my meal. What do you have?"Student: "Tea, Coke, Sprite, cognac, and brandy."

A common sight in restaurants in Zhongshan, even at breakfast, is a bottle of liquor in the middle of the table. Having "wine" (usually translated jiu, meaning any kind of alcohol) with a meal is not a foreign idea, but the fine distinctions among the types of alcohol usually drunk before, during, or after a meal in the West require some explanation.

Typical American classroom culture is also hard for students in China to understand.

After hearing in a listening comprehension talk that young Alfred Hitchcock went to strict schools, one student asked, "What other kind is there?"

Chinese students are usually highly motivated and don't expect the kind of song-and-dance routines that American teachers employ to try to keep their barely interested students from being disruptive or falling asleep. But Chinese students do doze off during long lectures, and most of their classes are long lectures.

In addition to passively listening, the students memorize and recite, read and translate. It takes a lot of work to get most of them to absorb and present information without memorizing it, to answer questions in their own words, or to participate in a seminar-type class.

As one Chinese essayist in China Daily observed, "stuffing students' heads full of knowledge is by no means the best way" to educate them. The writer, obviously a radical revisionist, advocated less reliance on lectures and more reliance on seminars and directed research.

Still, the examination system in China has for centuries tested memorized knowledge, and classroom initiative has for centuries come from one source—the teacher—even if heads do nod from time to time.

30 October 2007

In 1987–88, the Far Outliers, with their two-year-old daughter in tow, spent a year teaching English at a new community college in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, China. The following is one of a series of articles I wrote in 1988. I sent them to a Honolulu newspaper, but they were not interested. So now I offer them as a retrospective on coastal China twenty years before hosting its first Olympics. At the same time, I am scanning in a lot of our old China photos and uploading them to my Flickr account or to my better-illustrated WordPress blog to illustrate this series.

Should students be allowed to fall in love on campus? Should students be allowed to hold part-time jobs? These subjects of student debates at Sun Wen College in Zhongshan City, Guangdong, indicate how different college life is in China and the United States. School policy answers "No" to both questions.

Those who argued that students should be allowed to hold part-time jobs said that students benefit by learning about the real world of work. But those who argued that students should be allowed to fall in love said only that a boyfriend or girlfriend is a good study partner. They said nothing about the real world. A few of our 18-year-old freshmen claimed not to know what "falling in love" means.

Schools and teachers play a much more parental role in China than in the U.S. Even in college, teachers may supervise students' leisure time as well as class time. The students' role includes running errands or doing chores for teachers.

When we moved into our apartment, some of our students were recruited to fill the planters on our balconies with dirt and plants. Our students often volunteered to help us with shopping.

High school students are even more closely supervised. From morning exercise to nightly study hall six days a week, they have hardly a free moment.

At Sun Wen College, no one who lives on campus needs an alarm clock to make sure they get up in time for class. At 6:15 every morning, the loudspeaker blares forth a wake-up medley of rousing orchestral pieces such as the Carmen Overture, Rhapsody in Blue, and Stars and Stripes Forever.

By 6:30 a.m., all dormitory students are supposed to be out on the soccer field doing morning exercises in unison. Breakfast--mostly rice soup (jook), sometimes dim sum—is served from 7 a.m. Classes begin at 7:45.

Most classes span two 50-minute periods. There are four regular periods in the morning. Everything shuts down at noon for the daily siesta, and classes resume at 2:30 p.m. Regular students attend class six days per week.

College students in China are a privileged minority and are highly motivated. They are also a serious lot, but probably less so in Zhongshan than in other parts of the country.

Sun Wen College also has a relatively high proportion of informal, fee-paying auditors who are improving their English in order to emigrate. We lost several students to emigration during the year we were there.

Basic education classes are held six nights per week from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. for students who have not yet met formal entrance requirements. Lab sessions for informal students are held on Sunday mornings.

There are no elective courses. You choose your major when you start, and that decides all of your courses. There is little room for individual initiative, especially since free time is kept to a minimum.

All classes are with the same classmates. This builds a strong class camaraderie. The whole class is also required to take part in such extracurricular activities as morning exercise contests, song contests, and clean-classroom contests.

The most recent song contest offered a cash prize to encourage more enthusiastic competition. At the same time, the students were required to sing at least one revolutionary song.

Each student sits at the same desk in the same room for most classes. Many study there in the evenings as well.

The dormitory at Sun Wen College is filled to bursting. There are six students to each room. Although some dorm students come from as far away as Guangzhou, others live not more than an hour's bicycle-ride away.

While the school cafeteria was under construction, the students were fed at an overloaded, tin-roofed canteen with coal-fired woks. A typical school lunch consists of a vegetable--usually choy sum, Chinese cabbage, or daikon--two or more protein dishes--often duck eggs, pork hash, small bony fish, water-buffalo beef, or tofu—and government-ration-quality rice, some of the worst you will ever taste.

29 October 2007

In 1987–88, the Far Outliers, with their two-year-old daughter in tow, spent a year teaching English at a new community college in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, China. The following is one of a series of articles I wrote in 1988. I sent them to a Honolulu newspaper, but they were not interested. So now I offer them as a retrospective on coastal China twenty years before hosting its first Olympics. At the same time, I am scanning in a lot of our old China photos and uploading them to my Flickr account or to my better-illustrated WordPress blog to illustrate this series.

In China those who have tap water don't drink it. Almost all the water and tea consumed each day by one billion Chinese goes through a kettle and thermos bottle first.

There must be at least a billion thermos bottles. If each thermos bottle is emptied twice a day, then four billion liters of water pour out of the mouths of thermoses each day.

Boiled water is the universal cleanser. Diners in China's typically grimy eating places often rinse their tableware with hot water or tea before they eat or drink anything. Some roadside eateries reassure their customers by bringing out all the tableware in a large soup bowl full of scalding water. The customers can rinse everything themselves.

Disposable eating utensils, like disposable medical supplies, are just coming into use in China. A recent China Daily letter to the editor lauded the growing practice of providing disposable chopsticks in restaurants in Beijing.

Some snack shops on the more well-beaten paths serve fastfood in throw-away containers. When you sit down to eat at these places, you first have to clean up the mess left by those who preceded you. And when you're finished, you leave your rubbish for the next person to clear off.

On board most trains, you can buy Chinese lunches served in plastic boxes with plastic spoons. After meal times, the train attendants sweep the mounds of disposable rubbish down the aisles to the end of the car, then open a window and toss it out into the fields along the railroad tracks.

Those who live in China are constantly aware of how dirty their environment is and have adapted their habits to deal with it. They are especially careful about what goes in their mouths.

Many people carry their own cups and chopsticks when they travel. When they buy canned or bottled drinks, most people don't let their lips touch the container. They use straws.

When people offer fruit to eat, they don't touch the edible part with their hands. They either hold it by the stem or with the peeled skin still wrapped around the fruit until it is accepted.

People in China are much more casual about the inedible parts of food. They discard bones, peels, and seeds either on top of the table or directly on the floor. Spittoons are everywhere, but they are much more likely to hold tea leaves, old rinse water, and food scraps than spittle.

We arrived in China from Honolulu with a thumb-sucking two-year-old who promptly became an even more ardent thumb-sucker when the shock of the new culture first hit her. Little Rachel's habit is considered vile there, and many an old lady tried to pull her hand out of her mouth when she sucked her thumb in public.

Rachel soon learned to refrain from putting her thumb in her mouth during the whole time she was in kindergarten. When she got home, she always asked us, "Suck this thumb?" so we could make sure her hands were clean before she indulged.

Other Honolulu habits she had to give up were sitting on the sink brushing her teeth with tap water, catching shower water in her mouth, and running around the house barefoot.

28 October 2007

In 1987–88, the Far Outliers, with their two-year-old daughter in tow, spent a year teaching English at a new community college in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, China. The following is one of a series of articles I wrote in 1988. I sent them to a Honolulu newspaper, but they were not interested. So now I offer them as a retrospective on coastal China twenty years before hosting its first Olympics. At the same time, I am scanning in a lot of our old China photos and uploading them to my Flickr account or to my better-illustrated WordPress blog to illustrate this series.

China undoubtedly has the world's largest reserves of rubble. Unfortunately, natural and man-made disasters have helped create a glut of rubble on the world market, so these reserves have little export value.

Of course, China also has the world's largest supply of cheap labor, with considerably greater export value. Chinese who emigrated as cheap labor in the past remain an important source of much-needed hard currency to China today. And many Hong Kong companies invest highly desired capital in China just to take advantage of the readily available labor.

The overabundance of labor and the relative shortage of capital and resources in China help explain the ubiquitous piles of rubble. Much of it consists of brick, mortar, plaster, gravel, sand, cement, bamboo scaffolding, pipes, and metal frames intended for eventual use or reuse.

In China, labor is "cheaper than bricks." Bricks are hardly scarce, but the demand for them is very high during the present construction boom. They are the major component of most buildings and most rubble. It isn't just the bureaucracy that throws up brick walls; virtually every factory, school, office complex, and construction site is surrounded by brick walls. Even temporary buildings and walls are made of brick.

Demolition proceeds brick by brick, each one cleaned of dried mortar and carefully stacked. If you had a dollar for every brick in China you could pay off the U.S. national debt and still have a bit of pocket money.

While China's conservation of valuable resources at the expense of cheaper labor helps create mountains of recycled rubble, the West's conservation of expensive labor at the cost of cheaper resources helps generate mountains of unrecycled garbage.

In everyday terms, cheap labor means:

The butcher charges nothing extra to trim or slice the meat you bought.

The sales clerk spends 15 minutes, at no charge, replacing a broken electrical plug with an 80-cent new one.

Labor accounts for only 25 percent of the monthly daycare bill. The rest is for food, supplies, and medicine.

A streetside vendor makes a living just refilling and repairing cigarette lighters.

The profit from selling 25 pounds of oranges is enough to make it worth the vendor's while to carry them to town and sit beside them most of the day.

It is cheaper to get someone to retype a page of text to mimeograph handouts for class than it is just to make 30 photocopies of the original.

The abundance of labor means that many more things in China are made, assembled, or installed by hand: brooms and mops, doors and windows, cabinets, wardrobes, tables, chairs, and beds. Westerners who pine for the days of pre-assembly-line craftsmanship could learn a valuable lesson there. Our two-year-old learned the ritual explanation "that's not made very well" or "this doesn't close very well."

Cabinets come with leftover shavings inside, and doors that refuse to shut properly.

Mirrors have to be individually cut to fit the frame on the wardrobe.

House doors have handles and latches at different angles and heights and usually need planing to fit the frame.

Every large piece of furniture requires wedging to level it.

Wiring and piping is installed after walls are finished, leaving a residue of drilled-out plaster, brick, and mortar on the floors.

Arc-welders work on-site, often without masks, drawing current from the residential master circuit and flickering the lights--even blowing out major appliances--as voltage drops and surges with each arc.

The one-by-two-inch ceramic fuses at every household outlet are often not interchangeable, but anybody with a screwdriver can easily replace the fuse wire.

So while standardized, prefabricated components reduce construction costs in the West, much Chinese labor and material is expended retrofitting and repairing. With so little standardization, designers also find it hard to estimate exactly how much material a particular job will require. As a result, construction sites contain many more primary ingredients and often many more leftovers than comparable sites in the West, lending even newly finished buildings a just-renovated and rubble-strewn look.

26 October 2007

The Provisional IRA was much like [Basque] ETA in its methods, and in some of its proclaimed objectives. Just as ETA sought to make the Basque provinces ungovernable and thereby secure their exit from Spain, so the Irish Republican Army aimed at making Northern Ireland ungovernable, expelling the British, and uniting the six northern provinces with the rest of Ireland. But there were significant differences. Since an independent Ireland already existed, there was—at least in principle—a practicable national goal for the rebels to hold out to their supporters. On the other hand, there was more than one Northern Irish community, and the distinctions between them went back a very long way.

Like French Algeria, Northern Ireland—Ulster—was both a colonial remnant and an integral part of the metropolitan nation itself. When London finally relinquished Ireland to the Irish, in 1922, the UK retained the six northern counties of the island on the reasonable enough grounds that the overwhelmingly Protestant majority there was intensely loyal to Britain and had no desire to be governed from Dublin—and incorporated into a semi-theocratic republic dominated by the Catholic episcopate. Whatever they said in public, the political leaders of the new Republic were themselves not altogether unhappy to forgo the presence of a compact and sizeable community of angrily recalcitrant Protestants. But for a minority of Irish nationalists this abandonment constituted a betrayal, and under the banner of the IRA they continued to demand the unification—by force if need be—of the entire island.

This situation remained largely unchanged for four decades. By the 1960s the official stance in Dublin somewhat resembled that of Bonn: acknowledging the desirability of national re-unification but quietly content to see the matter postponed sine die. Successive British governments, meanwhile, had long chosen to ignore so far as possible the uneasy situation they had inherited in Ulster, where the Protestant majority dominated local Catholics through gerrymandered constituencies, political clientelism, sectarian pressure on employers, and a monopoly of jobs in crucial occupations: civil service, judiciary and above all the police.

If politicians on the British mainland preferred not to know about these matters, it was because the Conservative Party depended on its ‘Unionist’ wing (dating from the nineteenth-century campaign to maintain Ireland united with Britain) for a crucial block of parliamentary seats; it was thus committed to the status quo, with Ulster maintained as an integral part of the United Kingdom. The Labour Party was no less closely identified with the powerful labour unions in Belfast's shipbuilding and allied industries, where Protestant workers had long received preferential treatment.

As this last observation suggests, the divisions in Northern Ireland were unusually complicated. The religious divide between Protestants and Catholics was real and corresponded to a communal divide replicated at every stage of life: from birth to death, through education, housing, marriage, employment and recreation. And it was ancient—references to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century quarrels and victories might appear to outsiders absurdly ritualistic, but the history behind them was real. But the Catholic/Protestant divide was never a class distinction in the conventional sense, despite the IRA’s efforts to import Marxist categories into its rhetoric. There were workers and priests—and to a lesser extent landowners, businessmen and professionals—on both sides.

Moreover, many Ulster Catholics felt no urgent desire to be ruled from Dublin. In the 1960s Ireland was still a poor and backward country and the standard of living in the North, while below that of most of the rest of the UK, was still considerably above the Irish average. Even for Catholics, Ulster was a better economic bet. Protestants, meanwhile, identified very strongly with the UK. This sentiment was by no means reciprocated by the rest of Britain, which thought little of Northern Ireland (when it thought of it at all). The old industries of Ulster, like those of the rest of the UK, were in decline by the end of the 1960s, and it was already clear to planners in London that the overwhelmingly Protestant blue-collar workforce there had an uncertain future. But beyond this, it is fair to say that the British authorities had not given Ulster serious thought for many decades.

The IRA had declined to a marginal political sect, denouncing the Irish Republic as illegitimate because incomplete while reiterating its ‘revolutionary’ aspiration to forge a different Ireland, radical and united. The IRA’s wooly, anachronistic rhetoric had little appeal to a younger generation of recruits (including the seventeen-year-old, Belfast-born Gerry Adams, who joined in 1965) more interested in action than doctrine and who formed their own organization, the clandestine, ‘Provisional’ IRA. The ‘Provos’, recruited mainly from Derry and Belfast, emerged just in time to benefit from a wave of civil rights demonstrations across the North, demanding long overdue political and civil rights for Catholics from the Ulster government in Stormont Castle and encountering little but political intransigence and police batons for their efforts.

The ‘Troubles’ that were to take over Northern Irish—and to some extent British—public life for the next three decades were sparked by street battles in Derry following the traditional Apprentice Boys’ March in July 1969, aggressively commemorating the defeat of the Jacobite and Catholic cause 281 years before. Faced with growing public violence and demands from Catholic leaders for London to intervene, the UK government sent in the British Army and took over control of policing functions in the six counties. The army, recruited largely in mainland Britain, was decidedly less partisan and on the whole less brutal than the local police. It is thus ironic that its presence provided the newly formed Provisional IRA with its core demand: that the British authorities and their troops should leave Ulster, as a first stage towards re-uniting the island under Irish rule.

The British did not leave. It is not clear how they could have left. Various efforts through the 1970s to build inter-community confidence and allow the province to run its own affairs fell foul of suspicion and intransigence on both sides. Catholics, even if they had no liking for their own armed extremists, had good precedent for mistrusting promises of power-sharing and civic equality emanating from the Ulster Protestant leadership. The latter, always reluctant to make real concessions to the Catholic minority, were now seriously fearful of the intransigent gunmen of the Provisionals. Without the British military presence the province would have descended still further into open civil war.

The British government was thus trapped. At first London was sympathetic to Catholic pressure for reforms; but following the killing of a British soldier in February 1971 the government introduced internment without trial and the situation deteriorated rapidly. In January 1972, on ‘Bloody Sunday’, British paratroopers killed thirteen civilians in the streets of Derry. In that same year 146 members of the security forces and 321 civilians were killed in Ulster, and nearly five thousand people injured. Buoyed up by a new generation of martyrs and the obstinacy of its opponents, the Provisional IRA mounted what was to become a thirty-year campaign, in the course of which it bombed, shot and maimed soldiers and civilians in Ulster and across mainland Britain. It made at least one attempt to assassinate the British Prime Minister. Even if the British authorities had wanted to walk away

from Ulster (as many mainland voters might have wished), they could not. As a referendum of March 1973 showed and later polls confirmed, an overwhelming majority of the people of Ulster wished to maintain their ties to Britain.

The IRA campaign did not unite Ireland. It did not remove the British from Ulster. Nor did it destabilize British politics, though the assassination of politicians and public figures (notably Lord Mountbatten, former Viceroy of India and godfather of the Prince of Wales) genuinely shocked public opinion on both sides of the Irish Sea. But the Irish ‘Troubles’ further darkened an already gloomy decade in British public life and contributed to the ‘ungovernability’ thesis being touted at the time, as well as to the end of the carefree optimism of the 1960s. By the time the Provisional IRA—and the Protestant paramilitary groups that had emerged in its wake—finally came to the negotiating table, to secure constitutional arrangements that the British government might have been pleased to concede almost from the outset, 1,800 people had been killed and one Ulster resident in five had a family member killed or wounded in the fighting.

24 October 2007

In 1987–88, the Far Outliers, with their two-year-old daughter in tow, spent a year teaching English at a new community college in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, China. The following is one of a series of articles I wrote in 1988. I sent them to a Honolulu newspaper, but they were not interested. So now I offer them as a retrospective on coastal China twenty years before hosting its first Olympics. At the same time, I am scanning in a lot of our old China photos and uploading them to my Flickr account or to my better-illustrated WordPress blog to illustrate this series.

Zhongshan lies just below the Tropic of Cancer at almost the same latitude as the Hawaiian Islands. Bananas and sugarcane, hibiscus and bougainvillea, mango, papaya, and palm trees are abundant. But the continental weather makes the winters much colder than Hawaiian winters—unless you live halfway up Mauna Kea or Haleakala.

The first time we got a real winter monsoon, the temperature dropped from 25 degrees Centigrade (77F) to 5 degrees (41F) in 24 hours. During winter, the southerlies and sunny weather can give daytime highs of 20 degrees Centigrade (68F), and the northerlies and cloudy weather can take overnight lows down to 5 degrees.

Houses are unheated, with no hot running water. The floors are mostly bare concrete or tile. The universal building material is plaster-covered brick and mortar. The doors and windows fit so poorly in their frames that houses are drafty. So the temperature inside is almost the same as it is outside, except for a slightly lower wind-chill factor.

The average is 22 degrees Centigrade (72F)—11 degrees (52F) in the morning, 11 in the afternoon!

Our apartment sat on a hilltop, fully exposed to the north wind blowing down over the flat delta. The kitchen, bathroom, and toilet all faced north. The winter wind gave each room its special torture.

The half-inch gap under its balcony door makes the kitchen the coldest room to work in. Chinese kitchens don't have ovens, and wok meals require minimal cooking time and a good bit of washing and chopping time. Icy tap water didn't make washing anything very appealing.

The watertank lid on our western-style toilet broke before it was installed, and the jerry-rigged flushing mechanism fell to pieces soon after we started using it. So after testing our mettle on the cold toilet seat, we had to dunk a hand in freezing water and pull out the rubber stopper to flush.

Until well into winter, we either took cold showers or filled a small plastic tub with hot water to wash with. Those are the two options available in most houses there. Then, in January, our school finally installed the gas hot-water heater they had bought for us.

The water heater had first been mounted above the western-style bathtub. But there was no room to fit the gas canister in the same room, so it was taken out again.

Several months later, it was remounted in the bath, holes were drilled through the wall into the toilet where the gas canister was put, and a rubber tube was run through the wall to the heater. Then it turned out the water heater needed repair, so it was taken out again. A month or so later, it was reinstalled. This time both water heater and gas canister were placed in a more open area outside the toilet—to reduce the chance of asphyxiation in the toilet or explosion in the bathroom. The workmen had to drill new holes and run new pipes through the toilet and bathroom walls. But they didn't feel the need to clean up the debris they left behind.

So now the hard part of taking showers was turning the hot water off and feeling the cold air all the more severely. The hard part used to be first turning the cold water on yourself.

There were two real advantages to the cold indoor temperatures.

First, the household mosquitoes take a vacation. Still, we usually lowered our mosquito nets at night, if only for that added layer of gauze between us and the cold.

Second, we didn't have to refrigerate the Chinese-made old-fashioned peanut butter to keep the oil from separating. In fact, we could have just unplugged the refrigerator if we hadn't kept a few things in the freezer.

To counter the cold, we drank many cups of hot tea, using the teacups to warm our hands as the tea warmed our throats. We learned to make ice tea from hot tea in 20 minutes—without ice or refrigeration.

We didn't have to count calories. We just had to keep shoveling them in. We developed more of a sweet tooth than we used to have, and our bodies demanded between-meal snacks to keep the furnaces stoked.

We dressed for dinner—and for lunch and breakfast—in the cold dining room. We even had to dress for bed, sometimes sleeping with our socks on—a barbarous custom!

As friends from Winnipeg, Canada, who were teaching there observed, cold is not so bad when there is somewhere you can go to get away from it. In our house, the only place we could escape the cold was under our quilts.

23 October 2007

In 1987–88, the Far Outliers, with their two-year-old daughter in tow, spent a year teaching English at a new community college in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, China. The following is one of a series of articles I wrote in 1988. I sent them to a Honolulu newspaper, but they were not interested. So now I offer them as a retrospective on coastal China twenty years before hosting its first Olympics. At the same time, I am scanning in a lot of our old China photos and uploading them to my Flickr account or to my better-illustrated WordPress blog to illustrate this series.

How would you like to spend only ten dollars a month for rent? The only catch is that you have to move to Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, China, and work at a local company for local wages.

Rent in Zhongshan looks good no matter how you figure it, but comparing the cost of living there with the same in Honolulu is still a bit tricky.

If you convert a Honolulu income of $2,000 per month to Chinese currency at the official rate of 3.7 yuan to the dollar, you would have more money to spend in a month than most people there make in a year. At the blackmarket rate of exchange, you would have twice that much. A couple who wanted to retire in Honolulu and live on their Zhongshan pension of 500 yuan per month would find first that they could not legally convert their yuan to "hard" currency at the official rate. If they then exchanged it on the blackmarket, they would end up with little more than $60 a month to live on.

But of course most people in Zhongshan earn Zhongshan wages and most people in Honolulu earn Honolulu wages. We need to match prices and wages in each place. So let's compare fairly average working couples with one preschool-age child. Both couples are full-time teachers. Each month, Mr. and Mrs. Zhang in Zhongshan receive 500 yuan between them, if you average in the periodic bonuses they receive. Mr. and Mrs. Hara in Honolulu bring home $2,000 after taxes, union dues, and so forth.

A typical monthly wage in other parts of China would be about 100 yuan. Prices are also lower, as are the choices of goods available.

Each month the Haras turn over $600, nearly one-third of their take-home pay, to their landlord, Mr. Chong, Zhang's uncle. The Zhangs' work unit—their college—provides them housing, but charges them 10 yuan each month for rent, 2 percent of their income. Gas, water, and electricity cost the Zhangs about 30 yuan (6 percent of their income). The Haras pay $40 a month (2 percent) for utilities.

The Zhangs are very lucky to have a telephone. It costs them about 25 yuan per month (5 percent of their income). They pay by the minute even for local calls. One time Zhang called his uncle in Hawaii and talked 10 minutes, at 12 yuan per minute. He'll wait for his uncle to call him next time. The Haras pay $25 a month for their phone (1.25 percent). They rarely call the mainland but do call the neighbor islands occasionally.

The Zhangs pay about 40 yuan per month (8 percent of their income) for full-time daycare for their 3-year-old. That includes breakfast and lunch six days a week and occasional doses of medicine. The Haras pay $300 a month (15 percent), to a private daycare center. That includes lunch and snacks.

Since their work unit furnishes their house, the Zhangs live close to work and pay little for transportation. They own two bicycles. Mrs. Zhang bought hers for 170 yuan (34 percent of their monthly paycheck). The Haras owe one more year of car payments at $170 a month (8.5 percent of their combined net), on the car they bought three years ago. They alternate chauffeuring.

Both the Zhangs and the Haras keep in touch with their relatives by mail. It costs the Zhangs one yuan (0.20 percent of their monthly income) to send ten airmail letters within China. But it costs them 20 yuan (4.0 percent) to send ten airmail letters abroad.

The Haras, by contrast, pay $4.50 (0.225 percent of their monthly net) to send ten airmail letters to Japan. It costs them $2.50 (0.12 percent) to send ten letters to the mainland.

The Zhangs recently made photocopies of family documents to help a relative emigrate. They paid 2.50 yuan for ten pages (0.50 percent of their income that month).

The last time the Haras photocopied ten pages, they paid 50 cents (0.025 percent).The Zhangs spend about 40 percent of their income on food, 200 yuan per month. The Haras spend about 20 percent of their net on food, $400 per month.

Both couples eat a lot of rice, the Zhangs 50 lbs. a month, the Haras 25 lbs. Each 25-lb. purchase costs the Zhangs 12.50 yuan (2.50 percent), and the Haras $5.00 (0.25 percent). The Zhangs could buy government-ration rice through the state store but the quality is much worse. So they cash in their ration and use the money to offset the cost of the better rice they buy on the private market.

The Zhangs eat much less meat than the Haras. They pay about 4.50 yuan per pound for pork (0.90 percent of their monthly income), 3.50 per pound for chicken (0.70 percent), and 3.00 yuan for a 12-ounce can of luncheon meat (0.60 percent). The Haras pay about $2.70 per pound for chop suey pork (0.14 percent), 99 cents per pound for chicken (0.05 percent), and $1.30 for a 12-ounce can of luncheon meat (0.07 percent).

Produce such as bananas, bean sprouts, cauliflower, celery and tomatoes cost between .40 and 60 yuan per pound in Zhongshan, 0.07 to 0.12 percent of the Zhangs' monthly income. Similar produce in Honolulu ranges from 39 to 99 cents per pound, 0.02 to 0.05 percent of the Haras' monthly net.

In proportion to typical local incomes, then, rice and meat cost ten times more in Zhongshan than in Honolulu. But fruits and vegetables only cost two to three times more. Of course, the Zhangs are able to spend much more of their money on food because they spend less than one-tenth as much on rent.

Imported food is outlandishly expensive in Zhongshan. A six-ounce jar of instant coffee costs the Zhangs 20 yuan, two months' rent (4 percent of their earnings). It costs the Haras about $4.00 (0.20 percent).

22 October 2007

In 1987–88, the Far Outliers, with their two-year-old daughter in tow, spent a year teaching English at a new community college in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, China. The following is one of a series of articles I wrote in 1988. I sent them to a Honolulu newspaper, but they were not interested. So now I offer them as a retrospective on coastal China twenty years before hosting its first Olympics. At the same time, I am scanning in a lot of our old China photos and uploading them to my Flickr account or to my better-illustrated WordPress blog to illustrate this series.

When all of China converts to daylight savings time during the summer, Zhongshan stays on Hong Kong time. To people in Zhongshan, Hong Kong and Macau seem at least as important as Guangzhou and Beijing.

It takes about two hours by hovercraft from Zhongshan Port to Hong Kong. There are two boats per day to Kowloon and two to Hong Kong. They are always full. There are also larger, slower, and cheaper ferries between Zhongshan and Shenzhen, the Special Economic Zone directly across the border from Hong Kong.

So when you buy vegetables at markets in Zhongshan, you shouldn't be too surprised if you find "Golden Boat Gift Shop, New Territories, Hong Kong" written on the plastic bag the vendor puts the potatoes in. (The fact that the vendor supplies the plastic bags is unusual enough in China.)

But there is even more traffic across the airwaves. Fewer than ten percent of households throughout China own TV sets, but it seems as if ninety percent do in Zhongshan. Many are tuned to Hong Kong. The special antennas and signal boosters needed to pick up Hong Kong cost extra money but are not hard to get. Televisions imported from Hong Kong have a special switch that toggles between the different audio channels used by Hong Kong and China.

Hong Kong stations present their weekly broadcast schedules on the air. So viewers who don't read Hong Kong newspapers are still able to keep well abreast of upcoming specials. Rambo, First Blood was a big hit in Zhongshan.

The commercials shown during English-language broadcasts give a strange picture of the desires of English-speaking consumers, many of whom pass through Hong Kong, few of whom live there. A great many ads are for luxury products: cigarettes, watches, furs, cars, fashions, perfumes, electronics, the sorts of things advertised in airline magazines. And the ads themselves are glitzy and expensive-looking.

But if you watch the Chinese-language programming directed at residents rather than travelers, you can witness the Hong Kong equivalents of American low-budget ads for car dealers and furniture stores.

In October 1987, the government launched a campaign to discourage viewers, especially party members, from watching Hong Kong TV. The authorities didn't want people tuned to Hong Kong while government stations were broadcasting the 13th Party Congress from Beijing in October or the 6th National Games from Guangzhou the following month. The campaign had some success. Everybody watched the National Games. The athletes from Guangdong Province won the most prizes.

In the months before we left, the provincial government was interfering with the Hong Kong TV signals and trying to bring in more clearly the provincial and national broadcast channels from Guangzhou. Some people told us that the officials in charge of public security thought Hong Kong TV helped keep people glued to their TVs and out of trouble, while those in charge of political education thought Hong Kong TV politically unacceptable.

Although Macau TV is less attractive, the city of Macau is even easier to get to. It takes less than an hour by bus from the center of Zhongshan City to Gongbei, the border town in Zhuhai Special Economic Zone. Every day thousands of people cross the border, carrying fresh food and Chinese medicine to Macau, and returning with as many goods and cigarettes as they can hide in their bags and clothing. Empty cigarette cartons litter the floor inside and outside of the restrooms that stand between the duty-free shops and Chinese Customs.

Officials responsible for political education are hard put to counter the allure of these two enclaves of rampant capitalism. A recent film, Escape to Hong Kong, deals directly with the issue. It tells of four people who escaped from Shenzhen during the Cultural Revolution. The only woman among them is forced into prostitution when no one will ransom her from the gangsters who hide the four in Hong Kong. Her husband finds work as a day laborer, they sleep in shifts, and he eventually kills himself. Another escapee finds respectable work as a chauffeur, and the fourth achieves some worldly success, but at the cost of marrying his boss's idiot daughter.

Many Zhongshan schools bought tickets to this movie for their entire student body. The accompanying short subject had a complementary political message. It was a documentary—with plenty of bare skin and bulging muscles—about New China's first-ever body-building contest, held in Shenzhen.

21 October 2007

In 1987–88, the Far Outliers, with their two-year-old daughter in tow, spent a year teaching English at a new community college in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, China. The following is one of a series of articles I wrote in 1988. I sent them to a Honolulu newspaper, but they were not interested. So now I offer them as a retrospective on coastal China twenty years before hosting its first Olympics. At the same time, I am scanning in a lot of our old China photos and uploading them to my Flickr account or to my better-illustrated WordPress blog to illustrate this series.

Zhongshan City is named after Sun Yatsen, better known as Sun Zhongshan in China. His birthplace, Cuiheng Village, is the major local tourist attraction. Tour companies in Macao do a brisk business in one-day tours of Zhongshan. The tourists walk through Dr. Sun's house, a museum about his life, the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Middle School, and a model factory or two. Their lunch in the revolving restaurant of either of the international tourist-class hotels may include pigeon, a local specialty, but not dog, another local favorite.

Sun Yatsen is the most durable and universally admired national hero in China. He led the struggle to overthrow the Manchu Dynasty in 1911. He also created the style of clothing known in the west as the "Mao jacket" and in China as the "Zhongshan suit." Almost every major city in China has a Zhongshan Road or a Zhongshan Park. Many also have streets named after Dr. Sun's Three Principles: minzu, minsheng, minquan, "(people's) nationhood, livelihood, and civil rights."

Zhongshan has over one million current residents, and is also the ancestral home of half a million overseas Chinese. So the local stamp collectors already had plenty of the standard U.S. overseas airmail stamps that we received regularly.

Formerly known as Xiangshan, "fragrant mountain" (a good match for nearby Xianggang "fragrant harbor"), Zhongshan was once an agricultural backwater in the vast and fertile Pearl River Delta. It is still mostly countryside, with an urbanized administrative center at Shiqi.

However, in 1984 the region embarked on an ambitious program of industrial development and foreign trade. It is now officially a prefecture-level city directly under the province administration, no longer a rural county.

Getting local goods to major cities used to take a long time. But now, over the improved roads and new toll bridges, you can get to Macao in about one hour and to Guangzhou in under four hours. From Zhongshan Port you can reach Hong Kong by hovercraft in two hours.

The port can also handle container shipping, and you can occasionally see a huge container truck slowly threading its way among the bicycles down the old narrow streets of Shiqi.

The booming local economy is fueled by:

Government investments in infrastructure, such as 1440 new bridges, over one million square meters of housing, direct-dial telephone lines to Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Macao, and a brand new college affiliated with Guangzhou's Zhongshan University.

Overseas infusions of capital and expertise, such as the over $100 million invested in 98 joint Chinese-foreign enterprises.

Earnings from exports of local food and industrial products, the latter earning $185 million in 1986, a fourfold increase over 1978.

Not all export earnings are reinvested in industrial development. Many private shops offer such imported consumer goods as Coke or Sprite, Marlboro or Kent cigarettes, Mateus wine or Remy Martin cognac, Nestles instant coffee or powdered milk, San Miguel or Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, Kjeldsens Danish butter cookies, Camay and Palmolive soap, Johnson's baby shampoo, Pears lotion, Kingsford corn starch, even Sunkist navel oranges and California apples and grapes. Japanese tape recorders, stereos, televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, copiers, and motorcycles are also much in evidence. You can buy all of these items in local currency, but the prices are very high.

Construction is everywhere. Every roadside village seems to have a newly painted gate and several big, colorful new houses going up. The flat fields surrounding the town of Shiqi are disappearing under factories and apartment blocs. The noise of the pile drivers is more constant than the periodic bursts of firecrackers. Our two-year-old daughter studied closely all the details of concrete-making. She knows all the ingredients.

On our college campus, we would wake up and go to sleep to the hum of bulldozers rearranging the landscape. Yesterday's path to school might be covered with dirt or rubble today. Noon and evening meal times were marked by sharp dynamite blasts from the nearby quarry that is turning a rocky, grave-covered hillside into gravel. Dynamite, bulldozers, and a thousand picks and shovels have taken large bites out of most of the hillsides on the edge of town.

Similar changes are taking place in other parts of China, especially in Guangdong Province, which is a pacesetter for the reform policies and has spawned several special economic zones: Shenzhen, opposite Hong Kong, Zhuhai opposite Macao, and now the entire island of Hainan, which is becoming a separate province with much more flexible economic policies.

Most China-bound tourists come to marvel at the magnificent achievements of the country's long history. Visitors to Zhongshan will be impressed much more by the direction and speed of change taking place in coastal South China, the bellwether of the country's future.

17 October 2007

Virginia hams hold a hallowed place in the culinary lore of my hard-eating heritage. During my childhood as a missionary kid in Japan, we would receive a smoked ham every Christmas from relatives back in Virginia and stretch out the eating of it as long as we could. The current issue of Common-Place now puts Virginia hams in fuller historical perspective in a fascinating article by David S. Shields entitled "The Search for the Cure: The quest for the superlative American ham":

No food in colonial Anglo-America declared gustatory adequacy at the world table more forcefully than ham. Travelers to the English territories, such as Rev. Andrew Burnaby, declared American pork superior in flavor to any in the world. With the establishment of the republic, the ingenuity of a population of artisanal food producers fixed upon improving the most estimable of American products, ham. Eminence in the sociable world of the agricultural societies, distinction in the market place, and victory in the food contests at the burgeoning world of fairs stimulated innovation in the curing of hams. Here we will chronicle the articulation of two schools of ham production: the dry-cure sect, who would increasingly view themselves as purists and traditionalists, and the wet curists, who regarded themselves as experimentalists in taste, economy, and scientific agriculture, yet whose pork brined in a barrel was the staple of the common household.

Antiquity conveyed the ur-cure, the primordial method of preserving meat. Salting and drying meat prevented the decomposition of flesh because moisture is a requisite for most bacterial reproduction and salt (sodium chloride) draws moisture from flesh. Unfortunately, sweating meat in rock salt turned muscle tissue gray and tough. It was discovered, however, that certain types of rock salt—salt with impurities—kept meat red and somewhat moist. This impure form of salt—called saltpeter—was sought out and admixed with salt for meat preservation until the Middle Ages when smoking was added to salt and saltpeter to impart flavor and to counter insect depredations. The method practiced by Europeans at the time of the settlement of Jamestown—common to Westphalian ham and Jamon de Iberica—was the "three s method": salt, saltpeter, smoke.

Ham modernity dates from the erection of what Wolfgang Shivelbusch has called the first global drug culture—the oceanic trading system that made the exchange of sugar, spice, tea, coffee, and chocolate the engine of the world system. Only after the explosion of the world sugar supply occasioned by the consolidation of the Brazilian cane plantations in the sixteenth century was the commodity cheap enough for trial and error in the kitchen and smokehouse. Indeed, there was decidedly a sugar moment in Western cuisine, when sucrose was added to everything as the pangustatory element. When added as the fourth s to the ancient cure, sugar mellowed the harshness of salted flesh. Sugar-cured hams became the bedrock of American porcine cuisine....

Ever since Hernando DeSoto brought his thirteen hogs into Florida, swine have flourished in North America. The earliest breeds did not resemble today's industrial pink pig. Indeed, the first settled hogs, the Iberico Black hog, the Old English breed, do not resemble their breed descendents, the Spanish Black and the Hampshire. Of these early types there is only one extraordinarily rare example left in America: the Ossabaw Island pig, a mottled descendent of the pigs that Spaniards loosed on the islands of the Caribbean and along the southeastern coast. One population survived into the twenty-first century on Ossabaw Island off the coast of Georgia. Slow-growing, irritable, and the most efficient fat-producing mammal known to science, the breed has become the fascination of biologists working on obesity studies....

Testimonies about the quality of New World ham date from 1688 when Rev. John Clayton, reporting to the Royal Society his observations on the commodities of Virginia, declared the meat as good as any to be had in Westphalia. This is a far more informative claim than it might appear on the surface, for it reveals much about the mode of preparation. Traditional Westphalian ham is made from hogs fattened with acorns from the oak forests of western Germany and then dry cured and smoked over a cold fire of beechwood and juniper boughs. The original Virginia ham derived its flavor from an acorn mast and dry curing. It was smoked. This is worth noting because during the eighteenth century there would be disagreement about the proper feeding of pigs and a related alteration in the method of curing....

William Byrd (1674-1744), the Virginia gentleman who championed an ethic of agricultural improvement, criticized the habit among country farmers (typified, for him, by the lazy North Carolinians described in his Histories of the Dividing Line) of letting hogs roam free in the forests to graze on roots and acorns. The semi-wild hog developed stringy muscle from its robust wandering life, and the farmer lost the benefit of its manure. Byrd would keep his pigs penned and fed on dung heap scraps. But with this diet, the meat of his animals, while more tender, risked becoming less palatable. What mattered more, taste or economy?... Feeding hogs on corn was pioneered in Pennsylvania at the end of the eighteenth century. In Virginia, where the taste of the mast-fed pig haunted the gustatory imagination, traditionalists followed the old country practice of letting swine loose in the woods. The practice continued until the early twentieth century when peanut mast was found to instill in pork something like that piquant yet mellow flavor infused by acorns....

Saltpeter, while essential for the preservation of hams, proved equally if not more important as an ingredient of gunpowder. In June 1642 the General Court of Massachusetts ordered every town to erect a shed and "make saltpeter from urine of men, beastes, goates, hennes, hogs and horses dung."...

Putting chilled, freshly butchered hams in salt was the only part of the process that did not suffer alteration in any of the schools of dry-cure preparation. European tradition usually had the slaughter of winter meat occur on St. Martinmass Day, November 11. But because of the importance of cool weather in the curing of hams, it took place substantially later in the American South: December in Virginia; January in the Carolinas. The fresh-butchered meat had to be cooled to about forty degrees Fahrenheit when salting was begun. Traditionalists would follow salting with the other two s's of the "dry cure": saltpeter and smoke. The proportions varied, but J. Q. Hewlitt's formula of one thousand pounds of meat, three pecks of Liverpool salt, and four pounds of saltpeter presented a norm. The hams were packed in tubs or casks. These were often perforated to allow liquid to drip out during the minimum of three weeks sitting. At the end of the salting period, during which fresh salt was often added to the tubs, the ham would be extracted and the salt coating washed off. Hewlitt then smoked the hams in a closed room using green hickory chips. It was important that the smoke be cool, so as not to cook the hams. Temperature in the smokehouse was not to exceed human body temperature. At the end of February the hams would be sewn up in bags for protection.

And that's how they were shipped to us in Japan. We had to soak each ham about 24 hours before cooking and eating any of it.

15 October 2007

Through a pingback to my WordPress blog, which attracts a lot more readers interested in religion than my older mirror site on Blogspot thanks to WordPress's tag aggregator, I discovered Khanya, a South African blogger who converted from Anglicanism to Orthodoxy, and who remains hard to pigeonhole politically. (That last characteristic I find most refreshing.) Khanya notes a very telling piece of historical perspective on African Anglican attitudes toward homosexuality, a perspective that seems little understood by many Anglicans outside Africa (or anybody else):

I’ve been watching from the sidelines as the Anglican Communion is tearing itself apart over homosexuality. The debate seems to generate more heat than light, and both sides seem to be talking past each other.

It seems to be a war of polemical slogans. The African “intransigence” has provoked a storm of racist bigotry in the Western homosexual lobby, with some bloggers being quite free with racist insults. The West [in turn] is accused of immorality and decadence, but very few have looked at the deeper issues.

The Muslim context helps explain the sensitivity of gay issues in one other key respect. In the region later known as Uganda, Christianity first arrived in the 1870s, when the area was already under Muslim influence and a hunting ground for Arab slave-raiders. The king of Buganda had adopted Arab customs of pederasty, and he expected the young men of his court to submit to his demands. But a growing number of Christian courtiers and pages refused to participate, despite his threats, and an enraged king launched a persecution that resulted in hundreds of martyrdoms: On a single day, some 30 Bugandans were burned alive. Yet the area’s churches flourished, and, eventually, the British expelled the Arab slavers. That foundation story remains well-known in the region, and it intertwines Christianity with resistance to tyranny and Muslim imperialism–both symbolized by sexual deviance. Reinforcing such memories are more recent experiences with Muslim tyrants, such as Idi Amin, whose victims included the head of his country’s Anglican Church. For many Africans, then, sexual unorthodoxy has implications that are at once un-Christian, anti-national, and oppressive....

South African Anglicans seem to have been fairly neutral in the battles being waged elsewhere in the Anglican Communion, and the account above gives a lot less information than that of Philip Jenkins. The protagonists in the Anglican battle, on the African side, seem to be Uganda and Nigeria, both countries on the border of Muslim and Christian Africa. South Africa is far removed from the tensions in those countries.

13 October 2007

Belgium, in short, combined all the ingredients of nationalist and separatist movements across Europe: an ancient territorial division reinforced by an equally venerable and seemingly insuperable linguistic gulf (whereas many residents of the Dutch-speaking regions have at least a passive acquaintance with French, most Walloons speak no Dutch) and underpinned by stark economic contrasts. And there was a further complication: for most of Belgium's short history the impoverished communities of rural Flanders had been dominated by their urban, industrialized, French-speaking Walloon compatriots. Flemish nationalism had been shaped by resentment at the obligation to use French, at the French-speakers' apparent monopoly of power and influence, at the francophone elite's arrogation to itself of all the levers of cultural and political authority.

Flemish nationalists, then, had traditionally taken for themselves a role comparable to that of Slovaks in pre-divorce Czechoslovakia—even to the extent of actively collaborating with the occupiers during World War Two in the forlorn hope of some crumbs of separatist autonomy from the Nazi table. But by the 1960s the economic roles had been reversed: Flanders was now presented by its nationalist politicians not in the image of backward, under-privileged Slovakia but rather as Slovenia (or—as they might prefer—Lombardy): a dynamic modern nation trapped in an anachronistic and dysfunctional state.

These two self-ascribed identities—repressed linguistic minority and frustrated economic dynamo—were now both woven into the fabric of Flemish separatist politics, such that even after the old injustices had been swept away and the Dutch-speaking provinces of the north had long since won the right to the use of their own language in public affairs, the remembered resentments and slights simply attached themselves to new concerns instead, bequeathing to Belgian public policy debates an intensity—and a venom—which the issues alone could never explain.

One of the crucial symbolic moments in the ‘language war’ came in the Sixties—fully half a century after Dutch had been officially approved for use in Flemish schools, courts and local government, and four decades after its use there was made mandatory—when Dutch-speaking students at the University of Leuven (Louvain) objected to the presence of French-speaking professors at a university situated within the Dutch-speaking province of Flanders-Brabant. Marching to the slogan of ‘Walen buiten!’ (‘Walloons Out!’) they succeeded in breaking apart the university, whose francophone members headed south into French-speaking Brabant-Wallon and established there the University of Louvain-la-Neuve (in due course the university library, too, was divided and its holdings redistributed, to mutual disadvantage).

The dramatic events at Leuven—a curiously parochial and chauvinist echo of contemporary student protests elsewhere—brought down a government and led directly to a series of constitutional revisions (seven in all) over the course of the ensuing thirty years. Although devised by moderate politicians as concessions to satisfy the demands of the separatists,the institutional re-arrangements of Belgium were always understood by the latter as mere stepping stones on the road to ultimate divorce. In the end neither side quite achieved its aims, but they did come close to dismantling the Belgian unitary state.

The outcome was byzantine in its complexity. Belgium was sub-divided into three ‘Regions’: Flanders, Wallonia, and ‘Brussels-Capital’, each with its own elected parliament (in addition to the national parliament). Then there were the three formally instituted ‘Communities’: the Dutch-speaking, the French-speaking, and the German-speaking (the latter representing the approximately 65,000 German speakers who live in eastern Wallonia near the German border). The communities, too, were assigned their own parliaments.

The regions and the linguistic communities don't exactly correspond—there are German speakers in Wallonia and a number of French-speaking towns (or parts of towns) within Flanders. Special privileges, concessions, and protections were established for all of these, a continuing source of resentment on all sides. Two of the regions, Flanders and Wallonia, are effectively unilingual, with the exceptions noted. Brussels was pronounced officially bilingual, even though at least 85 percent of the population speaks French.

In addition to the regional and linguistic communities, Belgium was also divided into ten provinces (five each in Flanders and Wallonia). These, too, were assigned administrative and governing functions. But in the course of the various constitutional revisions real authority came increasingly to lie either with the region (in matters of urbanism, environment, the economy, public works, transport and external commerce) or the linguistic community (education, language) culture and some social services).

The outcome of all these changes was comically cumbersome. Linguistic correctness (and the constitution) now required, for example, that all national governments, whatever their political color, be ‘balanced’ between Dutch- and French-speaking ministers, with the prime minister the only one who has to be bilingual (and who is therefore typically from Flanders). Linguistic equality on the Cour d'Arbitrage (Constitutional Court) was similarly mandated, with the presidency alternating annually across the language barrier. In Brussels, the four members of the executive of the capital region would henceforth sit together (and speak in the language of their choice) to decide matters of common concern; but for Flemish or Francophone ‘community’ affairs they would sit separately, two by two.

As a consequence Belgium was no longer one, or even two, states but an uneven quilt of overlapping and duplicating authorities. To form a government was difficult: it required multi-party deals within and across regions, ‘symmetry’ between national, regional, community, provincial, and local party coalitions, a working majority in both major language groups, and linguistic parity at every political and administrative level. And when a government was formed it had little initiative: even foreign policy—in theory one of the last remaining responsibilities of the national government—was effectively in the hands of the regions, since for contemporary Belgium it mostly means foreign trade agreements and these are a regional prerogative.

The politics of this constitutional upheaval were just as convoluted as the institutional reforms themselves. On the Flemish side, extreme nationalist and separatist parties emerged to press for the changes and benefit from the new opportunities to which they gave rise. When the Vlaams Blok, spiritual heir to the wartime ultranationalists, rose to become the leading party in Antwerp and some Dutch-speaking suburbs north of Brussels, the more traditional Dutch-speaking parties felt obliged to adopt more sectarian positions in order to compete.

Similarly, in Wallonia and Brussels, politicians from the French-speaking mainstream parties adopted a harder ‘communitarian’ line, the better to accommodate Walloon voters who resented Flemish domination of the political agenda. As a result, all the mainstream parties were eventually forced to split along linguistic and community lines: in Belgium the Christian Democrats (since 1968), the Liberals (since 1972), and the Socialists (since 1978) all exist in duplicate, with one party of each type for each linguistic community. The inevitable result was a further deepening of the rift between the communities, as politicians now addressed only their own ‘kind’.*

*The main newspapers, Le Soir and De Standaard, have almost no readers outside the French- and Dutch-speaking communities, respectively. As a result, neither takes much trouble to report news from the other half of the country. When someone speaks Dutch on Walloon television (and vice versa) subtitles are provided. Even the automatic information boards on interregional trains switch back and forth between Dutch and French (or to both, in the case of Brussels) as they cross regional frontiers. It is only partly a jest to say that English is now the common language of Belgium.

Wow. It's almost as if Belgium has been governed by a bunch of enlightened North American university administrators with ever-expanding budgets.

10 October 2007

Every wonder about the Orthodox Church in Indonesia? Yeah, me neither. But I just came across this interview with Archimandrite Daniel D. B. Byantoro of the Gereja Ortodoks Indonesia. Here's the lead-in (with a few editorial corrections) and one excerpt about the Archimandrite's theological approach in Indonesia:

Orthodoxy was first established in Indonesia in Batavia, Java, as a parish of the Harbin Diocese in accordance with the Ukase of the Harbin Diocesan Council of November 23, 1934, № 1559. In the late 1940s, the parish was under the omophorion of Archbishop Tikhon of San Francisco. Unfortunately, after the Dutch relinquished their powers to the local leadership, many of the Russian parishioners fled during this period of civil unrest, and eventually the parish closed in the early 1950s, when its rector Fr Vasily immigrated to the USA.

The following is an online interview conducted by orthodox.cn with Fr. Dionysios (and his wife Presbytera Artemia Rita), one of the six newly ordained priests in Indonesia....

Theologically speaking, Archimandrite Daniel Byantoro also used the existing thought patterns of Indonesian culture to package Orthodox teaching within the Indonesian mental set up. Just as the Church Fathers had to face Greek paganism, Judaism, and Gnosticism in order to present the Gospel intelligibly to ancient peoples, Orthodox theology faces similar challenges in the context of the Indonesian mission.

Those challenges are:

The Islamic strand that has similarities with Judaism.

The Hindu-Buddhistic strand that has similarities with Greek paganism.

The Javanese-mystical strand called "Kebatinan" (the "Esoteric Belief") that has similarities to Gnosticism. (It is a blend of ancient shamanistic-animism on the one hand and Hindu-Buddhistic mysticism and Islamic Sufism on the other, and is divided into many mystical denominations and groups, just like Gnosticism was.)

The secularistic-materialistic strand of the modern world.

The first three strands have made the Indonesian people intensely religious. Into this religious and theological climate, the Patristic approach to ancient Greek paganism, Judaism and Gnosticism has provided, for the present writer, a paradigm to deal with all those strands inherent in Indonesian culture. In this regard, Orthodoxy must build trust among religions in Indonesia before it can have any significant influence. By maintaining a harmonious relationship with other religions existing in the country, Orthodoxy can contribute toward combating the pernicious influence of materialistic secularism.

In term of Orthodox religious practices, there are religious practices that cannot be described as belonging to any particular religion in Indonesian culture. They are practiced all over Indonesia, and although they have many different names and some slight variations in practice, they basically have the same pattern. These practices include fasting, ascetic labor, communal meals, prayer for the dead, and the keeping of relics. Archimandrite Daniel Byantoro had to deal with these cultural religious practices carefully, in order that Orthodoxy be acceptable to the Indonesian people.

For example, the practice of sitting on the floor for religious purposes is adopted in the worship of the Church in Indonesia. "Coned rice" instead of kolyva is used for commemorating the dead, since Indonesians do not eat bread as their main staple and do not grow wheat. The prayer of the Trisagion is used to replace the traditional Indonesian practice of honoring departed ancestors. Women wear veils in the Church, as was traditionally done by Orthodox people, but also conforms to the idea of the pious woman in the Indonesian culture. Icons and relics, with a right Orthodox and biblical understanding, have replaced amulets and heirlooms. Communal meals are usually done during festivities in the Church, as well as during Lent, where everybody breaks their fast together in the Church after Pre-Sanctified Liturgy. Some cultural symbolism has been adopted as well for the usage of the Church, such as the usage of young coconut leaves for decorating the Church building during festivals and feasts.

There is something of a misconception among Japanese—or at least among that minute percentage of the population that has any knowledge of the subject—that the Westerners of Ogasawara acquired Japanese family names when they were naturalized as Japanese citizens back in the early Meiji era. This is not true.

When the original inhabitants of the islands began to be naturalized in 1877, only a few took Japanified names. Among these was the almost legendary German figure Frederick Rohlfs (1823–98), who settled on Hahajima and aided subsequent Japanese arrivals when they were on the verge of starvation. He was commonly called "Rose," probably because this is how his name sounded to Japanese listeners when pronounced by English speakers. His legal Japanese name was composed of five kanji (Sino-Japanese) characters chosen strictly for their pronunciation. Although they convey no coherent meaning, when combined the characters (pronounced as Rōsu Rarufu) sounded something like the two pronunciations of his family name. Rohlfs was in the minority, however; most of the Westerners (referred to as kikajin ‘naturalized people’ in those days) used katakana renderings of their own Western family names as the official names in their koseki, or Official Lineage Registries. These were not Japanese family names, nor Japanified versions of their Western names, but simply adaptations of them to the Japanese phonology and representations of them in the Japanese script (e.g., Gilley became Gērē, Savory became Sēborē, Webb became Uebu, Washington became Washinton, Gonzales became Gonzaresu).

The usage of kata[ka]na names continued for a couple of generations. It was not until the Sōshi Kaimei (創氏改名‘Establishment of Family Names and Alteration in Given Names’) law that people with non-Japanese surnames were forced to change them. This 1940 law is mainly known for its effect on the millions of colonized people in Korea, but it also affected the Bonin Islanders. Elderly islanders today recall choosing their own last names, often hurriedly and quite randomly....

Some of the islanders chose kanji characters that either sounded like their original names or expressed some significant meaning. The Savorys became Sebori (瀬堀 [‘rapids-ditch’]), and the Ackermans, the Akaman (赤満 [‘red-full’]) family. The Webbs chose characters that could be read as Uebu (上部 [‘upper-part’]) (though the name is pronounced Uwabe today). Other families decided on a name with some symbolic value. The Gilleys, proud of the "South Sea Islander" part of their roots, chose the name Minami (南 ‘lit. south’). Other families abandoned the idea of names in which either the sound or the meaning of the kanji held significance. In most cases, different family names were chosen by distant branches of the family tree, so that the Gonzales family descendants became either Ogasawara (小笠原 ‘little-hatshade-field’) or Kishi (岸 ‘shore’).

During the war years, Westerners gave their children Japanese names. Children born after World War II (during the U.S. Navy period) were given only English names, and they use these today—written in katakana—as their official Japanese names.

Following the reversion to Japan, Westerners adopted the practice of giving Japanese names—written in kanji—to their children, but even here, we find cases of islanders identifying with their cultural roots. One case of this is Nasa Sēborē (セーボレー那沙), born in the 1980s, whose name, although written in kanji, is an homage to his ancestor Nathaniel (pronounced "Nasanieru" in Japanese).

Some of the Westerners legally changed their surnames back (from Japanese ones forced upon them in 1941) to their older katakana names following the changes in the Japanese law in the 1980s.

In many cases, a single individual has possessed four legal names in the span of his or her life. A case in point is Able Savory. He was born Sēborē Ēburu (in katakana, セーボレーエーブル), was forced to changed his name to Sebori Eiichi (in kanji, 瀬堀栄一) at the start of the war, and used Able Savory (in the Roman alphabet) during the Navy Era. Ａｆter the 1968 reversion, he reverted to his wartime kanji family name, but used the katakana "first name" given to him at birth, resulting in the name Sebori Ēburu. In the 1980s, when some of the Savory clan changed their surname back to the katakana Sēborē, he decided four names in one lifetime were enough and retained the kanji surname.

In Ogasawara today, one finds many interesting name-related phenomena. Nicknames—in both Japanese and English—are the norm. Then, most of the Westerners have two names; many have both Japanese and English surnames and given names, which means there often are at least five or six ways to refer to most Westerners.

07 October 2007

Saturday's New York Times carries a fascinating report by Elaine Sciolino on a remarkable research project undertaken by a priest who also doubles as a father confessor to the historical actors whose belated confessions he elicits.

The Nazis killed nearly 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine after their invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But with few exceptions, most notably the 1941 slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, much of that history has gone untold.

Knocking on doors, unannounced, Father Desbois, 52, seeks to unlock the memories of Ukrainian villagers the way he might take confessions one by one in church.

“At first, sometimes, people don’t believe I’m a priest,” said Father Desbois in an interview this week. “I have to use simple words and listen to these horrors — without any judgment. I cannot react to the horrors that pour out. If I react, the stories will stop.”

Over four years, Father Desbois has videotaped more than 700 interviews with witnesses and bystanders and has identified more than 600 common graves of Jews, most of them previously unknown. He also has gathered material evidence of the execution of Jews from 1941 to 1944, the “Holocaust of bullets” as it is called.

Often his subjects ask Father Desbois to stay for a meal and to pray, as if to somehow bless their acts of remembrance. He does not judge those who were assigned to carry out tasks for the Nazis, and Holocaust scholars say that is one reason he is so effective....

Father Desbois became haunted by the history of the Nazis in Ukraine as a child growing up on the family farm in the Bresse region of eastern France. His paternal grandfather, who was deported to a prison camp for French soldiers in Rava-Ruska, on the Ukrainian side of the Polish border, told the family nothing about the experience. But he confessed to his relentlessly curious grandson, “For us it was bad, for ‘others’ it was worse.”...

To verify witnesses’ testimony, Father Desbois relies heavily on a huge archive of Soviet-era documents housed in the Holocaust museum in Washington, as well as German trial archives. He registers an execution or a grave site only after obtaining three independent accounts from witnesses.

Only one-third of Ukrainian territory has been covered so far, and it will take several more years to finish the research. A notice at the exit of the Paris exhibit asks that any visitor with information about victims of Nazi atrocities in Ukraine leave a note or send an e-mail message.

“People talk as if these things happened yesterday, as if 60 years didn’t exist,” Father Desbois said. “Some ask, ‘Why are you coming so late? We have been waiting for you.’”

06 October 2007

Which word is more poetic? Snail or tadpole? Escargot ou têtard? Melc sau mormoloc? Schnecke oder Kaulquappe? (Jeez!) Much depends on the poetic traditions of the language in which one is writing—whether rhyme and meter are important, for instance.

What got me wondering was the original Japanese version of that famous haiku by Kobayashi Issa:

The more common form for ‘snail’ is katatsumuri, so in Japanese the choice offered above is: Katatsumuri ka?Otamajakushi ka?

One thing katatsumuri has going for it is its five syllables (or moras), perfect for an opening or closing line of haiku. (Snails feature in 53 out of Issa's 8000 haiku.) But snails seem to lack any specific seasonal association, at least according to Yamamoto Kenkichi's The Five Hundred Essential Japanese Season Words.

Otamajakushi ‘tadpole’, on the other hand, has good seasonal associations. But its six syllables can only fit well into the middle line of haiku, with the help of a filler particle like ya. Maybe that's why Issa wrote 166 haiku about frogs (... tobu kawazu ‘jumping frog’, ... naku kawazu ‘croaking frog’, kawazu kana ‘frog ...’ etc.), but apparently none about tadpoles. It's not really that hard. Here's one I made up.

羹にお玉杓子や蛙哉atsumono ni / otamajakushi ya / kawazu kanaIn the broth / Is it a tadpole / Or a frog ...

Regardless of their poetic qualities, these two words have interesting etymologies.

お玉杓子 otamajakushi literally means a ball (otama) ladle, scoop, or rice paddle (shakushi), which well describes the shape of a tadpole. Well, okay, a giant tadpole.

蝸牛 lit. ‘snail-cow’ can be pronounced kagyū in its Sino-Japanese reading, but the kanji have no relation to the several native Japanese words for ‘snail’: katatsumuri, katatsuburi, dedemushi, dendenmushi. When I was a kid, I learned dendenmushi, but I had forgotten whether it meant ‘snail’ or ‘caterpillar’. If I had to guess at the native Japanese etymologies for the two principal words for ‘snail’, I would propose that dendenmushi comes from dandan ‘little by little’ + mushi ‘bug’ (i.e., a slow-moving creepy-crawly); while katatsumuri comes from kata- ‘hard’ + tsumuri ‘head’ (i.e., a hard-shelled creepy-crawly).

UPDATE: And Matt comes through with a much more thorough and enlightening post! He finds support for the same etymology for katatsumuri (‘hard head’), but explains that de(n)de(n)mushi comes from a recent song appealing to the snail to come out (hence 出 de-) of its shell. Better yet, the latter term, the only one I had heard, seems to have arisen in Kyoto, where I spent my elementary school years.

UPDATE 2: Matt of No-sword follows up with a wonderfully clarifying post on one of the murkiest issues in contemporary herpetological poetics, the difference between two types of frogs in Japanese: the poetic kawazu and the aquatic pedestrian kaeru.

Before I repeat Matt's far more poetic conclusion (which Language Hat has already done, dammit ribbit!), I should add that Japanese kaeru has been borrowed into at least one language in Micronesia: Yapese kaeyruu, where it seems to refer mostly to the decidedly prosaic and invasive marine toad (Bufo marinus), a species more fit for senryū than haiku.

Only three amphibians are native to the [Polynesia-Micronesia biodiversity] hotspot, and all are ranid frogs of the genus Platymantis. Two species are endemic to Fiji, the Fiji tree frog (Platymantis vitiensis) and Fiji ground frog (P. vitiana, EN), and one, the Palau frog (P. pelewensis), is endemic to Palau. All three species are related to other Platymantis species in the Solomon Islands and in New Guinea.

This explains why, of all the Micronesian dictionaries I consulted, I could only find a native word for ‘frog’ in the Palauan Dictionary: bechébech, where the unaccented e represents a schwa (uh, er sound) and the ch represents a glottal stop. (By the way, the E[uro]speranto words for ‘frog’ and ‘toad’ are rano and bufo, respectively.)

So here's the enlightening conclusion to Matt's follow-up frog post, which cites one of the most famous haiku of all by perhaps the most famous haiku poet of all.

Bonus fact: Bashō was actually consciously playing with the kawazu tradition here by attributing the sound to the water rather than the frog. The frog's implied silence, after centuries of naku kawazu [‘croaking frog’], is a crucial part of the stillness that allows the sound of water to make its impact.

Many words in use in the Bonins even in the late twentieth century are thought to be derived from the contact with Pacific Island languages that occurred from the 1830s until the end of the nineteenth century. Today these lexemes are used not only in the English of the Bonins, but in Ogasawara Japanese and the Ogasawara Mixed Language as well. Hawaiian words form the majority of the Oceanic-language words we find in the Bonins. Since Polynesian migration to the islands occurred only in the early history of the settlement, it seems clear that most of these words came to the island during the first half of the nineteenth century.

I'll list some of the most straightforward examples, where the meanings and the sounds correspond most closely. The following list presents the Hawaiian word first, then its various derivatives in the Bonins, where the pronunciation has been influenced not just by Japanese and English phonology (and the lack of orthographic standards), but by varieties of Hawaiian that are now nonstandard (for instance, those that retained t in place of King Kamehameha's k).